All 16 entries tagged Philosophy Research

Kant, painting unlocking sensation in senus communis

Follow-up to Cezanne unlocking sensation, painting nature from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

To reiterate Kant, sensation is thought without purposiveness. It is thought that is not taken up by a concept into some telos, some definite finality beyond itself. Just a present, not a future or a plan. It is an impression, but not that of the Impressionists. An impression expressed, but not that of Expressionism. Always outwards facing to the world, but with an entirely internal character of its own. Already a complex assemblage of interactions across the many planes of the mind, planes that anticipate perception, but singular as these complex registers resonate at the sime time. This singularity frames the sensation, but not in any discursive context, only as a repetition of affects.

In his rejection of narrative in favour of the triptych, the attendant figure and repetition, Bacon is the most Kantian of painters yet. His approach is always to address the sensation with a diagram (as Deleuze calls a painterly technique applied to thought). The diagram imediately diverts the path of the sensation onto the canvas and back out into sensation. Diverts it away from assimilation to concepts and narrative. It establishes, frames, a second register like that of the anticipations of perception, this time on the canvas. The painting becomes a focus for the repetition of the sensation, to the painter and others. It is as Kant says, a sensus communis.

Robert O'Toole : 18 Aug 2004 06:44 |  Tags: Anticipation Of Perception Attendant Figure Cezanne Deleuze Deleuze And Art Diagram Expressionism Francis Bacon Kant Paining Philosophy Research Purposiveness Repetition Sensation Sensus Communis Telos Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Cezanne unlocking sensation, painting nature

Follow-up to On art and the art of war – Bacon and Cezanne from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Deleuze:

Cezanne, it is said, is the painter who puts vital rhythm into the visual sensation. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 43

This vital rhythm is what Deleuze later calls the diagram of the painter. It is:

…the operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line-strokes and color patches. ibid, p.101

They are applications of paint and the hand of the artist that rhythmically reappear. Diagrams are used to unlock sensations, to release them from their immediate take-up in discursive and representational diversions, to bring us to the sensation itself, in its plurality and complexity…

…there are not sensations of different orders, but different orders of one and the same sensation… ibid p.37

…but for no reason other than its own actuality. This complexity, singularity and actuality turned Cezanne towards nature:

Every sensation, and every Figure, is already an "accumulated" or "coagulated" sensation, as in a limestone figure. ibid p.37

Cezanne sought the event or irruption of the sensation as we experience in nature:

This is what one must achieve. If I reach too high or too low, everything is a mess. There must not be a single loose strand, a single gap through which the tension, the light, the truth can escape. I have all the parts of my canvas under control simultaneously. If things are tending to diverge, I use my instincts and beliefs to bring them back together again… Everything that we see disperses, fades away. Nature is always the same, even though its visible manifestations eventually cease to exist. Our art must shock nature into permanence, together with all the components and manifestations of change. Art must make nature eternal in our imagination. What lies behind nature? Nothing perhaps. Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand. So I close the errant hand. I take the tones of colour I see to my right and my left, here, there, everywhere, and I fix these gradations, I bring them together… They form lines, and become objects, rocks, trees, without my thinking about it. They acquire volume, they have an effect. When these masses and weights on my canvas correspond to the planes and spots which I see in my mind and which we see with our eyes, then my canvas closes its fingers. It does not waver. It does not reach too high or too low. It is true, it is full… cited in Cezanne by Ulrike Becks-Malorny, Taschen 2001

Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire

Robert O'Toole : 18 Aug 2004 00:36 |  Tags: Cezanne Complexity Deleuze Deleuze And Art Figuration Francis Bacon Logic Of Sensation Nature Philosophy Research Rhythm Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On art and the art of war – Bacon and Cezanne

Some principles of successful military command:

• Recruit and train forces, divide them up, and arrange them according to the terrain in which they will operate and the opposing arrangements of enemy forces. This requires intelligence, strategy, and imagination.
• Identify a sufficiently distant goal so as to allow for a wide range of local conditions to emerge on the path to that goal.
• Provide the forces with time and space in which to operate with relative autonomy in order to explore and adapt to local conditions so as to move towards the objective. This requires diplomacy, political guile, and a certain charm in dealing with those who demand results.
• Encourage the different individual divisions of the forces to advance with speed or caution as required so as to co-ordinate with each other.
• Maintain the necessary lines of supply and communication to and between the divisions (resource going to the front).
• Maintain the necessary lines of supply and communication from the divisions (resource returning to the command).

On art and the battle ground of the canvas:

As i think Deleuze indicates in his book on Bacon, these artists had a deeply strategic understanding of how to enable, command even, their artistic powers. Each of these principles of good command can be seen in their practices. For example, Deleuze describes how for these artists the terrain is sensation, the enemy is figuration (the figural locked to representation), and the relatively autonomous forces are the artistic diagram (a difficult term, capturing a technique in its relation to the figural but not at the mercy of representation). The diagram is unleashed into unanticipated and dangerous territories of sensation:

The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm. It is a violent chaos in relation to the figurative givens, but it is a germ of rhythm in relation to the new order of the painting. As Bacon says, it "unlocks areas of sensation." Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation, p.102

Deleuze describes in great detail Francis Bacon's strategy for painting, for creativity, for achieving all of the above for the cause of the campaign, creating paintings that each unlock sensation in a new way. He sees this in all great painters, citing Van Gogh and Klee as well, and of course Cezanne, who was prior to Bacon the most effective documentor of the battle ground of the canvas.

Robert O'Toole : 18 Aug 2004 00:00 |  Tags: Asymmetrical Warfare Autonomous Lines Cezanne Deleuze Deleuze And Art Diagram Figuration Francis Bacon Logic Of Sensation Paul Klee Philosophy Research Sansation Transversality Transversality Van Gogh |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Four Ontological Functions Diagram

Warning! This won't make any sense to you if you haven't read a substantial amount of work by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. That's why it's in the 'philosophy' category. I've posted it because for a few months now i've been trying to understand the diagram in Guattari's Chaosmosis, which is clearly an attempt to summarize his work with Deleuze such that he can use it in his work in psychiatry, education, and cultural practices. I post it as public as I know there are many D&G experts out there who might want to comment and say "you've just got it entirely wrong".

• The whole diagram represents the connective synthesis. Present within it at all points is both the body without organs and the plane of consistency, the composer and the composed of desiring-production. (1)
• The actual column is the always present, active disjunctive synthesis of striated space. (2)
• The virtual column is the always presupposed, passive conjunctive synthesis of smooth space. (3)
• The possible row is formed by organisational strategies that make the repetition of an organisation more likely, projecting the past into the future, a composing force tending towards the body without organs, towards an absolute difference. (4)
• The real row is formed by the absolute difference between past and future states, the composed fact tending towards the plane of consistency. The possible drives this absolute difference.

Every activity involves all four ontological functions. The critical project of Deleuze and Guattari is to demonstrate that separate activities, such as art and science, have mistakenly been placed in relations of subservience to each other. This has been done by associating an activity with a single ontological function, locating it in just one sector of the matrix, whilst another activity is placed in a complementary sector. Instead, we need to recognize that each activity itself involves all four ontological functions simultaneously. Both art and science, for example, are independently operational connective syntheses, and neither is ontologically dependent upon the other. Similarly, the ‘models’ described in A Thousand Plateaus (technological, musical, mathematical, maritime, aesthetic) are all different instantiations of the connective synthesis.

Notes:

1. The Connective Synthesis of Production. (Anti-Oedipus p.68).
2. The Disjunctive Synthesis of Recording. (Anti-Oedipus p.75).
3. The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption and Consummation. (Anti-Oedipus p.84).
4. For Deleuze and Guattari, signification is distributed across the disjunctive synthesis (the movement to expressive dissipation) and the conjunctive synthesis (the movement to enunciative concentration): the sign does not produce fantasies, it is a production of the real and a position of desire within reality. (Anti-Oedipus p.111). Lack does not figure in this as both the possible and the real already presuppose all three syntheses: the concentration, the dissipation and the connection. The restriction of an activity to one sector of the diagram introduces lack. The positioning of a complementary activity in another sector of the diagram offers a solution to that lack, hence the relationship of subservience between the activities (e.g. art and science).

Robert O'Toole : 15 Jul 2004 09:11 |  Tags: A Thousand Plateaus Actuality Body Without Organs Chaosmic Incarnation Chaosmosis Conjunctive Synthesis Connective Synthesis Content Deleuze Disjunctive Synthesis Expression Four Ontological Functions Guattari Incorporeal Complexity Machinic Discursivity Philosophy Research Possible Real Transversality Transversality Virtual Enunciative Nuclei |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Painting and Hysteria

Follow-up to Miro's Chaosmosis, Guattari's Art from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

I am still slowly working my way through Deleuze's book on Francis Bacon, the Logic of Sensation. It is quite superb. In fact I think the most effective (solo) book by Deleuze. If I had more time I would blog extensively about it. When I move to Kenilworth I will have more time, and hopefully might even finish reading it (and the 5 other books i'm in the middle of). Anyway, all i want to say for now is that it's a great primer for looking at any paintings, for example, this helps me to see why Miro is so special:

…there is a special relationship between painting and hysteria. It is very simple. Painting directly attempts to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation. The colour system itself is a system of direct action on the nervous system. This is not a hysteria of the painter, but a hysteria of painting.

Robert O'Toole : 25 Jun 2004 06:39 |  Tags: Deleuze Deleuze And Art Francis Bacon Hysteria Joan Miro Logic Of Sensation Painting Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Miro's Chaosmosis, Guattari's Art

Last weekend Emma and I bought a Fundació Miró print of Pintura. This is to go in our bedroom at the new house in Kenilworth. Looking at it reminded me of something that I wrote just after visiting the Fundació, an interesting coincidence of reading a book on Miro and Guattari's Chaosmosis. I've rescued the text from my old MT blog and repeated it below…

Andre Breton on Miro's Constellations: "They belong together and differ from one another like the aromatic or cyclic series of elements in chemistry. If one considers them both in their development and as a whole, each of them assumes necessity and value like a constituent in a mathematical series. And finally, they give the word 'series' that special meaning by their uninterupted and exemplary sequence." Miro by Janis Mink, Taschen 2000.

Felix Guattari on the Production of Subjectivity: "In this conception of analysis, time is not something to be endured; it is activated, oriented, the object of qualitative change…A singualrity, a rupture of sense, a cut, a fragmentation, the detachment of a semiotic content – in a dadaist or surrealist manner – can originate mutant nuclei of subjectivation. Just as chemistry has to purify complex mixtures to extract atomic and homogeneous molecular matter, thus creating an infinite scale of chemical entities that have no prior existence, the same is true in the 'extraction' and 'seperation' of aesthetic subjectivities or partial objects…that make an immense complexification of subjectivity possibile – harmonies, polyphonies, counterpoints, rhythms and existential orchestrations, until know unheard and unknown." Chaosmosis (page 19)

Miro described how he would evolve the elements of his works from partial objects viewed while staring at the ceiling above his bed. He worked these partial objects into existential orchestrations relative to each other, generating a "necessity" (in the Kantian sense) to their being produced. Guattari takes the Bergsonian interpretation of Kant in seeing subjectivity as enduring or being subject to necessities (refrains or exemplary sequences). But like Miro he knows that these necessities are not given, they are produced through knowable mechanisms (time is activated) – and if they can be known, then they can be chosen, so he has the possibility of an ethico–aesthetic paradigm.

Robert O'Toole : 25 Jun 2004 06:17 |  Tags: Andre Breton Chaosmosis Chemistry And Painting Composition Deleuze Deleuze And Art Ethico-Aesthetic Ethics Guattari Joan Miro Kant Music Necessity Painting Philosophy Research Production Of Subjectivity Rhythm Subjectivity Transversality Transversality |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

First idea for a PhD proposal

Over the last couple of days I have been distilling an idea about what might justify several years of academic work. Interestingly this idea has emerged from what I have been blogging about, as well as the work I have been doing in the Arts Faculty at Warwick. The idea is to give a much clearer idea about what the arts are, why arts education and theraphy is essential, and what follows from that in terms of cultural and political actions. But fundamentally, it is about a philosophical project that seeks to demonstrate the proper position and importance of aesthetics, which is no longer as an adjunct of epistemology. So here's my first thoughts:

Each art has a different arrangement of sensory experience that is drawn from and develops an everyday machinery of experience. As such we can talk about a 'clinical essence of each art' (Deleuze, Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation p.54). But what does Deleuze mean by clinical essence? His work with the psychotherapist Guattari was concerned with seeing psyhcological disorders as psycholgical orders (sensory arrangements) interrupted, 'botched' as they say in A Thousand Plateaus, carried out without the required support and context. In response to this they see the 'clinical essence' as being both the sensory arrangement and the support required for its successful operation (from, for example, the psychotherapist). This is a key point in Deleuze's aesthetics, one that also occurs at around the same time as Guattari's Chaosmosis. Art is both a sensory aesthetic expression and a therapy that supports and enhances that expression. And following from that, in the process of establishing and developing that clinical essence, it makes sense for there to be a pedagogical practice for each art, ensuring that the clinical essence is realised. Guattari, involved as he was directly in the clinical practice, was concerned with developing this pedagogy of the arts as therapy.

So the claim then is that there is, appropriate to each art:

• a manner of arranging sensory experiece which defines the art;
• a clinical essence defined by that sensory experience;
• a pedagogical practice;
• an evaluative judgement (aesthetics) to guide that pedagogical practice.

In the book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze goes into great detail about painting, and in some detail about music. In Proust and Signs, and elsewhere, he talks of prose and poetry. Dance on the other hand, which has an interesting relationship with both music and painting, remains to be explored. And perhaps we can apply this approach more widely. The study of history, for example, as an art with its own sensory arrangements, clinical essence, pedagogy and aesthetics. And how about languages, mathematics, sociology, the sciences, which now rather than being seen as solely motivated by a universal progression of knowledge are instead justified as therapeautic processes in themselves.

I'm just working on some short summaries of D&G's thoughts on the various art forms, including more on painting from the Francis Bacon book. That'll appear here shortly.

Robert O'Toole : 11 Jun 2004 10:59 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (13) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Fearless Speech, Foucault, parrhesia and blogging

Follow-up to Journalists, imperceptibility and the threat of blogging from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

The Greeks of course have 'been there, done that'.

One of the books that I am reading at the moment is Fearless Speech, a transcript of Michel Foucault's lectures on parrhesia in Ancient Greece. It's a complicated concept which, as Foucault demonstrates, evolves within the Athenian debate on democracy and good governance. He explains how, to start of with, the concept expressed how the Greeks valued most highly the speech given by an individual citizen both in a state of freedom and in defiance of the threat of violence. That threat was fundamental, for it shows that the statement of the speech was more important than the speaker. It goes so far as seeing the life, welfare and continued existence of the speaker to be of no importance in relation to the importance of the utterance, of a sequence of utterances that together form a dialiectic from which the best policy will be logically selected. The speaker is made imperceptible.

It seems odd at first that Foucault, at the cutting edge of a new approach to ethics, should have given such a scholarly series of lectures on the Greeks. He doesn't seem to be too concerned with unpicking the obvious contradictions in this concept of parrhesia, which after all was quite adequate for a long period of history. But what Foucault is really interested in is showing how a smoothely operating concept like parrhesia becomes problematic and is disrupted by a change in circumstances, by something imperceptible in its operation being drawn out from the shadows. Just as blogging draws out the previously imperceptible traits of the blogger from the journalistic process.

Foucault describes the problematic of parrhesia as it became posed for the Greeks:

Democracy is founded by a politeia, a constitution, where the demos, the people, exercise power, and where everyone is equal in front of the law. Such a constitution, however, is condemned to give equal place to all forms of parrhesia, even the worst. Because parrhesia is given even to the worst citizens, the overwhelming influence of bad, immoral, or ignorant speakers may lead the citizenry into tyranny…

So the personality of the speaker is drawn out, made perceptible, and allowed to disrupt the smoothe communication of the parrhesiastic statement. Although it is posed here as an issue of morality, it is clear that the driving force is a technical development: commerce based political organisation, which increasingly has power amongst the demos. Pushing the integrity of the speaker out into the open challenges the concept of parrhesia, and adds to it a critical function in the analysis of the role of power and money.

For us now, with the onset of blogging as a new arrangement of speech and identity, it is what comes after this crisis that is of most interest. In response to the technological drawing out of the speaker, a technics of the individual, of integrity, balance, morality and judgement develops – what Foucault calls 'the care of the self'. A set of techniques for identifying and managing the person to promote good parrhesia. Resulting in an approach to the self that, although not Christian or modern, remained influential.

The question now then is this – will the drawing out of the blogger from imperceptibility transform in some way our techiques of self? For readers of Foucault, this is of prime interest.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Jun 2004 23:44 |  Tags: Ancient Greece Fearless Speech Foucault Parrhesia Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Tati, Gursky, machines, gadgets and structures – Part 2

What stimulates something 'to be', to endure? Obviously one cannot answer that by refering to the identity and existence of the thing itself, a paradoxically self-contained sense, or a non-sense. The alternative is a continuous and repetitive abrasion of sense. A stimulation by difference. Of a being in state A and then state B, such that it irreversibly loses some aspect of state A without possibility of reconstruction, but with a memory of that loss. The difference between states A and B being unstatable but ever present, a pure sense. The subjective registers are pure sense machines, prospecting virtual Universes far from equilibrium.

From this chaos, value is a kind of temporary arrangement of sense into a repetitive structure, a cooling down that is necessary for the further production of sense. Structures have the possibility of exchangeability, a trade-off necessary as the multiplicity of desiring machines simultaneously seek the balance between constituting subjective registers and prospecting unknown and unknowable virtual Universes. A structure never deterritorializes alone, but rather constitues it's subjective register with other structures along a plane of consistency. A pattern of irreversibile changes, arrangements of pure sense, a partial objectification.

...occupied by inputs and outputs whose purpose is to make the structure function according to a principle of eternal return…

This flocking behaviour exploits the relative efficieny of large numbers of distinct entities constituting the 'same' arrangement of subjective registers, exploiting the same tricks, extending a phyla of technical apparatus in response to a plane of consistency. As a strata of such uniform entities develops, it provides a generic code that can be repeatedly connected with and manipulated. The phyla is arranged into a strata and becomes a gadget.

The photographs by Gursky, as undercurrent identifies , picture the great machines in their vast expanse, their plane of consistency or environment, but with the action stalled, posing the question: is this a strata of gadgets or a mechanosphere?

Human beings in Gursky' photographs, where they are shown, are shown in anonymous arrangements, distributions in space…. Often (e.g. isKlausen Pass 1984) humans are scattered, scarcely noticeable, like a handful of gravel thrown over the landscape, but nevertheless transforming the surface on which they crawl; making of it a territory, a map, a plan.

The traders in the stock market photo are machines belonging to a specific phylum and existing within a specific plane or environment, defined by values belonging to the adaption of those machines to the environment. An image of cooperation and differentiation together on a massive scale.

Robert O'Toole : 03 Jun 2004 11:37 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Tati, Gursky, machines, gadgets and structures – Part 1

Writing about web page http://blog.urbanomic.com/undercurrent/archives/000266.html

I'm working on a long text in response to reading Guattari's Chaosmosis. So far it's a bit delirious, but then reading Deleuze & Guattari is quite hard and requires a high degree of experimentation to get anywhere. It is an oversimplification. I haven't as yet included my thoughts on Guattari's diagram. Here it is, so far…

Undercurrent's recent post on Tati made me think about machines and gadgets:

They show humans as tiny gadgets hopelessly under the influence of a 'machine for living' with its own unfathomable vectors and desires.

For a modernist understanding of the 'machine for living' this would be a mistaken inversion. The modernist project concieves of humans as being full of 'unfathomable vectors and desires' to be mastered by a machine that is a limited and rigidly defined structure. Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, sees the human as merely a temporary structure arising by coincidence from the aleatory development of complex machines. In this case, the 'machine for living' is that which sustains the 'tiny gadgets' by feeding them with experience, difference and desire.

This inversion gets right to the heart of schizoanalysis, which redefines the relative nature of machines and gadgets, and provides an explanation of how the latter arises from the behaviour of the former – a kind of transcendental logic of machines.

In the chapter on Machinic Heterogenesis in his book Chaosmosis, Guattari gives what is perhaps the best definition of machines, structures and (implied though not referred to) gadgets, which are a special kind of structure:

The difference supplied by machinic autopoiesis is based on disequilibrium, the prospection of virtual Universes far from equilibrium.

Every gadget or structure is actually part of a machinic assemblage that borders on the inexplicable, unpredictable and irreversible. Take for example a train. What is it's drive? What makes it happen repeatedly? One could say that it is the timetable, but really that is only its method, its structure. Alternatively it could be the specific flow of capital that makes the train journey viable. But why does that capital flow? Why do people make the journeys, buy the tickets? The train is only a gadget driven onwards repeatedly by a machine (or machines) persuing something more than repetition, prospecting for difference to fuel their engines. So ask again what drives the train? Clearly the passengers are its primary drive, as they come together for a thousand different reasons. Why do they do this? Each passenger is themselves operating to construct some sense, to encounter interactions that produce a definite effect in some subjective register that they constitute. So the key to the drive of the train lies in the individual and collective desire of the passengers, in a diverse range of subjective registers, as diverse as the subjects that constitute them.

To understand the drive behind the train, one must first understand how these subjective registers operate. Only then can we go on to consider how structure emerges out of this complexity, in this case, how the value of the train journey is created. And finally we can consider how as a result of this value humans are produced as structures then gadgets.

Robert O'Toole : 03 Jun 2004 11:36 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Works by Heron and Ayres lost in warehouse fire

Writing about web page http://vgallery.warwick.ac.uk:8080/gallery/ExhibitionPaged.do?path=h_1/g_26/e_cusef_1084890139938

Much has been said in the press about the loss of works by Emin and Hirst in the recent warehouse fire. Unfortunataley, the damage is much more widespread, with large numbers of works by other significant British artists being lost.

This includes many works by Patrick Heron and Gillian Ayres, both of whom are represented in the University collection. You can see the works that we have in this exhibition in the Virtual Mead system.

Robert O'Toole : 30 May 2004 09:30 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Deterritorialization, nomadic ethics

Follow-up to Ted Simon and the art of deterritorialization from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

It's about deterritorialization, transmission and chaos.

As anyone who has really travelled will agree, meaning is entirely territorial, contexual. When you make an utterance, it's meaning is its effect. If you think that your utterance has a meaning that is disconnected from the world in which you are embedded, that is simply because you have constituted a territory of your own that maintains some superficial degree of seperation. On moving to a different territory, your meaning is transformed. Religions understand this process, and deal with it by providing the individual with highly portable means of rapidly re-establishing the territory anywhere (the cross, the Koran, the ritual). They employ territorial codes. That's why religion, which claims to be of spiritual origin, uses such physical means for its maintanance.

This is nothing new, humans are essentially nomadic and have evolved techniques for managing deterritorialization and reterritorialization. These techniques are the ethics of deterritorialization, the issue that has really been at the core of philosophy, and where there is no time for philosophy, of politics. For when the deterritorialization becomes intense, the ethics is sidelined for a technics of transmission, of reterritorializing immediately anywhere anytime: imperialism.

But imperialist channeling of our inherent nomadism always faces the same difficulty. It releases floods of deterritorialization, allowing millions of individuals to participate in an increasingly global movement. It's not just the conquerers that are deterritorialized, as at the same time the conquered participate in the transmission and decoding of the code. The bigger the scale of movement, the more individuals are involved, the more mutation there will be of the code. The more mutation that occurs, the more desperate the individuals are to transmit and use it before it is lost. As this activity becomes frenetic and tranmission increases, the more prone it is to fluctuations that take hold and send it off to new and unexpected directions. That's the engine of history.

Back in 73 when Ted Simon arrived in North Africa he quickly discovered the forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This was a collision of trapped third world forces trying to connect with global flows and a westerner trying to understand the powewrful effect he has on the world as he travelled. Through the journey he again and again reflects upon territory, travel and meaning.

Robert O'Toole : 20 May 2004 09:17 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Ideas for philosophy PhD work

I'm meeting top Deleuze expert (and ***collapse contributor) Keith Ansell Pearson today to discuss possible gradaute (PhD?) study in the Philosophy Department. I haven't had much time to think about an actual proposal, but have a few vague notions connected to his book Germinal Life and issues related to introducing e-learning into different academic disciplines.
Here's a few random strands….

• How different academic disciplines form, how they are maintained, different systems of knowledge, how they operate together.
• Regimes of spatiality within different academic disciplines. How these regimes remain implicit. Foucault on space. Regimes of spatiality and technology in academic disciplines. Related to work with the 3D Visualization Group an some interesting ideas from Hugh Denard.
• How regimes of space relate to duration as time experienced – Bergson, Deleuze, Ansell Pearson.
• Ethics of non-deterministic causality.

Robert O'Toole : 18 May 2004 12:01 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Wittgenstein on stalling and disengagement

Following from that… I randomly opened Philosophical Investigations at the point at which he says that language sometimes operates like an engine over-running in neutral (he was also a mechanic). At that point philosophy becomes necessary to bring it back into engagement. The standard reading would be that Wittgenstein sees the disengagement as detrimental. I'm not sure about that, as I haven't read enough. It could be that the free-play of language disengaged is in fact a good example of the moment in which duration is expressed, as Bergson described.

Robert O'Toole : 14 May 2004 22:06 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Note on 2 aspects of time

"These moments that are given are a gift from time".

The sense that the moment, as opposed to the event which is a different but complimentary aspect of time, is a stalling before irreversibility, before the event. These stallings are a key element of duration as Bergson described. What is the relationship of the two aspects?

Duration is essentially the 'continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist'. Ansell Pearson citing Bergson in Germinal Life, p. 34

The nature of that continuation is not as a deterministic sequence of states, but more like the debris of a previous condition the totality of which is lost in the transition and hence not traceable. The moment is determined by the past and the future, its relation to the event that disurpts it, by a qualitative loss, an untraceable and non-determinstic causation.

That Bergson's method of intuition claims to be ethical it is in its engagement with other durations as such stallings, indeterminacies facing irreversibility. But more, it is in opposition to the tracing of present states back to deterministic causal reifications. The state arrives through its loss, forgetting as Nietzsche claims, of the complex conditions out of which it emerged.

Robert O'Toole : 14 May 2004 20:10 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem